Portfolio ↗

Quiz

2741 questions of the kind that actually get asked — in interviews, in architecture review boards, and by the person who has to run the thing at 3 AM. Every answer states the trade-off rather than the slogan, and says when the obvious choice is the wrong one.

All areas2741 Architecture Fundamentals81 Distributed Systems101 Data Architecture90 Cloud Architecture87 Networking86 API & Integration Architecture78 Reliability & Resilience99 Observability92 Performance & Capacity Engineering90 Security Architecture95 Cost Architecture & FinOps92 Business Architecture93 Architecture Communication91 Enterprise Architecture91 Legacy Modernization92 AI-Era Architecture96 Software Architecture & Engineering84 Architecture Patterns84 Architecture Decision-Making91 The Architect's Meta-Skills92 Delivery & Release Engineering93 Platform Engineering & Developer Experience92 Testing & Quality Architecture102 Data Platform Architecture98 Streaming & Real-Time Data93 Data Governance & Semantics91 Frontend & Experience Architecture91 Edge, Mobile & IoT88 Regulatory & Data Protection Architecture90 Assurance, Audit & Model Risk98
Difficulty Any beginner intermediate advanced

1018 questions.

  1. Postmortems intermediate

    Reddit published a postmortem for its 14 March 2023 outage: a Kubernetes upgrade from 1.23 to 1.24 on its oldest and largest cluster renamed a node label, the CNI's route reflectors selected nodes by the old label and found none, pod networking collapsed, and the site was down for 314 minutes before a restore from backup. Review the *postmortem* as a document. What makes it useful, and what would you push back on in any version of it?

    3 min answer redditpostmortemkubernetesincident review
  2. Pragmatism intermediate

    An architect must choose between the correct design and the one that ships in time. How should pragmatism be exercised without accumulating unmanageable debt?

    2 min answer linearpragmatismdebtreversibility
  3. Pragmatism intermediate

    You inherit a well-designed plan for a new order-management platform: eight months, event-sourced, three services, a migration path off the legacy system. The business now needs working functionality in ten weeks for a contractual commitment. How do you sequence this so the ten-week work is not thrown away?

    3 min answer sequencingpragmatismlegacyincremental-delivery
  4. Pragmatism intermediate

    You review a design for an internal tool with 200 users: microservices, Kubernetes, event sourcing, CQRS, multi-region. How do you respond?

    2 min answer pragmatismreviewcomplexity
  5. Presentation Skills intermediate

    An architect must present a genuinely complex distributed training architecture to a mixed audience in twenty minutes. What structure works?

    2 min answer presentationstructurecomplexityaudience
  6. Presentation Skills intermediate

    Review this deck for a 25-minute architecture review: slides 1 to 6 cover the landing zone and network layout, 7 to 18 walk through each microservice, 19 to 26 show the data model, 27 to 31 give the test strategy, and 32 to 34 ask for four engineers for two quarters. The approval has been deferred twice. What would you cut, what would you change, and what would you leave alone?

    3 min answer presentationreviewdeck-structuredecision-forcing
  7. Prioritisation intermediate

    120 engineers wait on a 45-minute pipeline, merging about 6 times a week each. Estimate the annual cost of that wait, and say what the number does and does not justify.

    2 min answer estimationdeveloper-productivityprioritisationcost-of-delay
  8. Prioritisation intermediate

    An architect has more improvement proposals than the organisation has capacity. What sequencing rule matters most?

    1 min answer prioritisationenabling-workleveragecost-of-inaction
  9. Prioritisation intermediate

    An architect has more work than capacity and every item has an advocate. What method produces a defensible allocation?

    2 min answer nykaaprioritisationcapacityallocation
  10. Prioritisation intermediate

    You are a new architect and every team tells you a different story about what is wrong. How do you decide where to start?

    1 min answer meta-skillsprioritisationonboarding
  11. Privacy by Design intermediate

    Product wants to add a recommendation feature using browsing history. Legal asks for a data protection impact assessment. What does architecture need to supply?

    2 min answer privacydpiadesigncompliance
  12. Private Connectivity intermediate

    A logistics platform must integrate with warehouse systems, carrier networks and enterprise customers over private connectivity. What determines the choice between VPN, dedicated interconnect and public endpoints with allow-listing?

    2 min answer delhiveryvpninterconnectintegration